Daddy Needs a Drink

Animal House

My youngest brother, whom we refer to lovingly (and accurately) as Crazy Eddie, has lived in Orlando, Fla. since before the Animal Kingdom was built, most of those years working as an entertainer for the largest media and entertainment company in the world. I kind of imagine my brother’s life is like the official website for Orlando itself: an obnoxiously colorful and busy landscape, full of pop-ups and moving screens advertising water parks, aquariums, “top 10 places to smile” and rides based on animated television shows or Hollywood blockbusters that have more than one sequel.

Crazy Eddie and I talk every few days (mostly he talks), and recently I’ve been amazed how easily he’s amazed. You’d think after being bombarded with countless breakfasts starring oversized ducks and mice in the morning and orgasm-substitute
fireworks displays in the evening, it would take a helluva lot to make even the most cheery sit up and pay attention. Not Eddie. He hasn’t lost his taste, even for the cheapest drug of the spectacle variety.

“Dude,” he tells me (yells at me) over the phone. “Never guess where I was last night.”

“Rehab?”

“Close but no cigar, Fidel. I’ll give you a clue.” Then he proceeds to lay on the stalest cockney accent this side of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and sings: “I’m Henry the VIII I am/Henry the VIII I am, I am.”

“She must have died and gone to casino circuit heaven. Given that her father wasn’t even born when the band had their biggest hits.”

“She was stoked! Especially since there were so many Noonatics there fighting for the schwag.”

“Lunatics? Sounds right.”

“No, little sister. Noonatics. Noon-a-tics,” he says slowly with the pace that stupid people employ when dealing with the deaf or foreigners.

As if it’s not hard enough for me to imagine my poor niece Marcy and nephew Nick being lugged to sad swan songs of fat and fading rock bands, Crazy Eddie then explains that there’s a group of pudgy and pickled adults who follow Peter Noone around donning fringe and British flags, holding signs and singing loudly to every word of “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.”

But then it clicks. B bands need B groupies in the same way Eddie needs something to do in that former backwater-turned-citrus-grove-turned-tourist destination for families desperately trying to “make some memories.”
So I let him rant on, happy we don’t live close enough for an invite.